From Off-White to Nike, Fashion Is Transparent Now

“Imagine how many fewer misunderstandings we would have,” the billionaire Ray Dalio writes in his book Principles, “and how much more efficient the world would be—and how much closer we all would be to knowing what’s true—if instead of hiding what they think, people shared it openly.” Dalio is laying out his principle of radical transparency: a management technique that requires employees to be brutally honest with each other that’s gained a stronger mainstream foothold in recent years—and has trickled into conversations about the internet, privacy, and good governance.

Fashion is, by definition, the opposite of transparent—it’s all about layering, swaddling, and draping to create an identity. But even that industry is having a moment of high transparency. Fashion (non-Demna Gvasalia division) being incapable of irony, this doesn’t mean that the massive luxury conglomerates that codify trends and dominate marketplaces are opening their books. No, in fashion, transparency means literally that: everything is see-through now. And far from increasing legibility, the turn toward the transparent has only further muddled everything up.

Transparent gear isn’t necessarily anything new. Typically, and for perhaps obvious reasons, it’s been mostly the province of womenswear, conjuring ‘90s raves and steamy avant-garde fashion shoots. Kanye West’s Yeezy even released translucent heels and boots for women in 2016. (Those only worked if you were wealthy enough to never wear them outside an air-conditioned space.) But in the last few years, as fashion has approached something like genderlessness, clear plastic made its way to the final frontier: menswear, and more specifically sneakers. Dwyane Wade had a pair of signature Jordans with a porthole midfoot; a recent pair of Comme des Garçons Dunks came out in 2017. So far, 2018 has been a big year for paper-thin, see-through Nikes: the culty Zoom Fly, the as-yet-unreleased [John Elliott sneaker for LeBron James], and the just-announced React Element 87. And half of Virgil Abloh’s “The Ten” collection for Nike was categorized as “GHOSTING,” a series of shoes stripped down and remade with transparent materials.

But sneakers are meant to be worn once and then flipped, with the transparent ones turned into windows for some overpaying hypebeast’s sock choices. The big news in transparency is in luggage. Last week, the French hardgoods concern Rimowa announced a collaboration with Off-White, Virgil Abloh’s exchange-student outfitter. In recent years, Rimowa has become shorthand for a certain kind of worldly world traveler. The brand’s signature case is unspeakably expensive, oddly tactical (all that aluminum!), and built, like so many playthings of the rich, to look better once beaten up. A Rimowa was designed to be impenetrable—which was important, because you, a creative, needed to make it to your DJ gig in Budapest, and then to a marketing meeting in Milan, and then to a gallery opening back home with all your sneakers intact.

The Off-White Rimowa, meanwhile, replaces all that aluminum with see-through polycarbonate. “It’s like 3.0 of personalisation. It’s not just putting your initials on it but allowing another layer to come in play,” Abloh told the Business of Fashion. “There’s an emotional component to owning [the suitcase] and you become a performance art piece just by using the thing.” I am not quite clear on the “performance art” bit, but Abloh demonstrated the piece’s aptitude for personalization in an Instagram Story post: sitting inside the case, at the top and turned on its side, was a bag from Dover Street Market. (Oddly enough, new Dior designer Kim Jones accessorized his the exact same way.)

An aluminum Rimowa marks you as a member of a specific social class. A polycarbonate Rimowa marks you as a member of the same class—but then forces you to justify your own position there. Dumb money can buy a fancy suitcase. Smart money knows to fill it with a shopping bag from the coolest department store in the world. The impregnable fortress has become yet another opportunity for personal branding, and has reconfigured the flow of luxury in the process: it’s shifting the production of “luxury” from the corporation to the consumer. The bag isn’t a luxury item unless your life is.

After Facebook and Cambridge Analytica made it clear that nothing was hidden to begin with, Abloh’s suitcase serves as a witty rejoinder, and the only possible response. Just put it all out there. It’s all known already. And as we race to further brand ourselves—to turn our reputation as the kind of people who own Rimowas into content we can be paid to post to Instagram—a see-through suitcase presents a tantalizing shortcut. Think you’re an influencer? Now you can prove it.

And at a time of heightened global anxiety, the Off-White Rimowa is, at least for an Abloh piece, unusually political. The piece resembles nothing so much as the bags correctional officers are required to bring into their workplaces, or perhaps the clear backpacks distributed to students at Stoneman Douglas in the wake of the shooting there—items meant to ensure safety, at the cost of the wearer’s privacy. But here, the polarity is reversed, the politics all warped. Instead of the state forcing you to be transparent, an Off-White x Rimowa owner has purchased the chance to show off: not “I have nothing to hide” so much as “‘It would be a shame to hide all this cool shit.”

Radical transparency is an ideology disguised as a tactic—a way to confront the fact that we are always already exposed, and to get out in front of that disclosure. We are all keenly aware of the fact that the clothes we wear, and the suitcases we put them in, say multitudes about us—both to the people following us on social media, and to the corporations hoovering up our anonymized purchasing data. Transparent fashion, then, returns some small amount of agency to its owner: we can now look through the objects of our envy—and see, if we’re smart, just how little is actually there.